We’ll drop Night Mode’s second album, Dirac Spike, on 3/31. Here’s a song from it, “Vikram Ray.”

It’s taken almost six months to get my chops up (Caroline Pluff was born and, y’know, holidays) but I’m returning to Sound+Vision studios at the Lawrence Public Library on March 6 to continue tracking drums for h&s’ fifth record.

Seven more songs (four for the record, three for b-sides) are on the docket, after I did five in the first session.  I hope that the combination of having gone through the process once and the tunes being easier will let me get through them all.

Matt’s going to loan me a couple extra snare drums that may circumvent the nasty snare-tom sympathetic resonance on the library’s otherwise outstanding-sounding C&C kit.

The goal is for me to have the drum tracks edited and a main guitar track and scratch vocal recorded by the time Scott’s students are out for the summer, so we can do his parts during his break.

Progress seems agonizingly slow in the midst of life.  But it’s not nothing.

Or users of other streaming services?

I’m looking at options for moving MFR onto the big streaming platforms.  What do you use, what do you like?

Artists, what digital distributors have you used?  I’m specifically interested in RouteNote; https://routenote.com/

1. Mixing a 4-song EP I recorded with Cory back in November
2. Designing and testing the Falcon Heavy v2.0 pedal
3. Mod work on my Sunmachine Fuzzo))) and Basic Audio Scarab Deluxe pedals
4. Having fun with the new Volca Bass synth
5. Listening to great new stuff from Nilsson to Run The Jewels to Martin Gore

I finished testing and finally boxed up the Larsen Expressive Feedback Loop this morning.  It’s good to have it done.

It’s more of a prototype than a finished product; while the circuit itself is really solid and I’m proud of its design, learning to work with wah enclosures was a giant pain and I had to jerry-rig several things with the hardware to get it to work.

Bit of a mess inside, but it’s loud and weird and fun.

The feedback potentiometer (what the foot treadle controls) is pretty sensitive; most of the play is toward the heel-down position of the treadle. If I were doing it again, I’d experiment with making a super-anti-log taper pot out of a linear pot and a resistor. Or, maybe I’ll upgrade this one with that in the future.

If I ever get around to making one of the doom records I’ve been writing, this thing will be all. over. it!

This week I ran across an email from July 30, telling Drew and Cory I’d started messing with a feedback loop circuit on my breadboard.  It’s taken until this weekend to get it soldered up.

Feedback loops can be simple and fun, but simple ones have a lot of limitations. Two big ones are that many pedals do nothing in them (because the pedals flip the signal’s polarity, so feeding them back just results in a quieter sound due to phase cancellation), and that they can get excruciatingly loud, fast, if the rest of your signal chain has enough headroom for it (like if your amp is running pretty clean).

I fixed those issues with a polarity inverter and limiting/hard clipping in the feedback loop.  I also added expression via treadle control of the feedback amount, and two modes for the loop: always-on (regardless of feedback on or off) and only-on-when-the-feedback-is-also-on.  (Mode names need work.)

Most pedals have one input, one output, and the circuit itself in a sort of loop within the pedal.  A feedback loop effectively has three inputs (main input, loop return, feedback circuit output) and three outputs (main output, loop send, feedback circuit input).  I hadn’t thought about all of that when I jumped into designing one, and all those signals crashing into each other results in a lot of parallel impedances and switching headaches I didn’t anticipate.  Given the challenges, I’m pretty happy with the performance of the design.

It’s not quite finished yet because I seem to have burned one of the footswitch connections, so I’m waiting for a replacement part to arrive.  I’ll do a video once it’s done.

That’s a lot of tech talk, but it’s pretty intuitive once it’s plugged in, I think; when you roll your heel back, you get more feedback.  It’s super-fun to play and useful for anything from freak-out noise to gentle washes of added delay or reverb.

I’ve finished my DS-1 lab experiments (previously discussed here and here) and boxed it up.  The full report is over on Mr. Furious Audio.